Coming Up: Naturists of the Year 2009

Remember Eva Mendes and Rosario Dawson?
They were my previous naturists of the year for my celebrity category anyway. At the end of each year I announce the winners of the Naturist of the Year Awards on this blog. This year I'll be a little bit later than usual, but do not despair.
I have divided the awards into two categories, the Celebrity Naturist of the Year and the Real Naturist of the Year. 'Real' because it's difficult to find a celebrity willing to admit he or she is really naturist. Their nude activities are often limited.
In 2007 I picked Eva Mendes for her love of nude gardening, in 2008 Rosario Dawson because she said her mother took her to a nude beach in New York when she was younger. I have no idea whether they still are real naturists, but they wouldn't appear on your average naturist beach now because all the paparazzi would follow them there as well.
My real naturists in 2007 were a British couple who left their comfortable lives behind to open a naturist hotel on a Greek island, that's my kind of dream, really. In 2008 I chose Taiwanese writer Pan Ying-hua for her book about her own naturist experiences, illustrated with numerous pictures of her and her friends putting naturism into practice on Taiwanese beaches. A courageous thing to do, both the beach naturism and the publishing of the book.
For this year - well, it wouldn't be a surprise if I revealed the winners today, but I have my mind already made up. Within the next few day, I will announce the winner/winners of the Real Naturist of the Year Award for 2009 first. It can be an individual, a couple or a group, but they must be involved in 'real' naturism. The winner of the Celebrity Naturist of the Year Award for 2009 will follow over the coming weekend, also on this blog. So keep looking. The answers will be there soon. The envelopes are ready.

Shushu and Yaoyao

Taiwan seems to have different star celebrities every week, and for the past days we've been regaled, if that's the word, with Shushu and Yaoyao.

Who are they? Minor models whose claim to fame is that the racy ads they appeared in were first banned from television, and then from the outside of the Taipei Arena and the outside of buses as well.

The ads were deemed to be treating women as objects. Both were designed to attract players to computer games - a predominantly male domain - and featured unrealistic images. One of the models - and don't ask me to tell Shushu from Yaoyao or the other way round - appeared in a T-shirt with a very deep cleavage, a safety helmet, and a pneumatic drill as she was racing through a street. There are many scantily clad beautiful young women in Taiwan, but none of them are construction or road workers. The other model was dressed up in all kinds of gear, nurse, bunny, student uniform, etc, and looked equally silly.

After complaints from women, the government's National Communications Commission banned the ad from TV. The Taipei City Government then banned it from its domain - the sports arena it runs and the buses it supervises.

Nothing wrong with that, since those ads, just like many others in Taiwan for furniture stores and motor shows, did not show any relevance between nudity and the objects for sale. It became more tricky when some people started complaining about excessive cleavage in ads for ... bras. How else are you supposed to sell a bra? Those are ads aimed at women, trying to sell products only women are supposed to wear. So, the campaign against exploitation threatened to go off the rails and become a campaign against any form of nudity.

Luckily, there was a new countermove on the pendulum and young college students argued there was nothing wrong with women showing off their shapes and curves for their own purposes.

Too bad the whole Shushu and Yaoyao situation is unlikely to bring about a healthier way of thinking about nudity. In Taiwan, many still consider the bikini, 61 years after its birth, to be racy and outlandish, and I'm only talking about the beach here.

A book like the one in the picture - a Belgian book about breasts by women for women - is still completely unthinkable in Taiwan and in most other Asian countries. Any publisher attempting it would face public and government wrath. Even a more modest book about nudity - by my 2008 Real Naturist of the Year Pan Ying-hua - was never widely released and only remained available locally and over the Internet.